The scope of Tressel

By: Michael Arace

The Columbus Dispatch - May 30, 2011 05:09 PM

My wife was talking a walk the other day and she came upon a stray dog, who followed her home. This morning, I went to Craig’s List to make a “found dog” posting in the Lost-and-Found area of that website. And there was this:

LOST JIM TRESSEL'S SOUL (OSU)

PLEASE KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN FOR JIM TRESSEL SOUL !!!

LAST SEEN AT YOUNGSTOWN STATE

This was posted just after news broke that Tressel had handed in his resignation and/or was fired this morning. Seriously. Go to craigslist.org, and there it is.

The national reaction to Tressel's ouster was was swift, right on down to the on-line personals.

If there was any thinking that coverage would be light because of the Memorial Day holiday, that thinking may have backfired. With so little going on in the sports world, Tressel was THE major story of the day and writers were roused from coast to coast.Generally, the punditry was wondering wondering whether OSU president E. Gordon Gee and athletic director Gene Smith ought to be next on the firing line.

By now, Ohio State would do well to send Tressel's superiors/enablers out with him. Smith has not distinguished himself in the handling of this scandal, and neither has Gee. The school has only managed to do the right thing at NCAA and media gunpoint, not as a proactive display of integrity.

The way the media works these days, it is awfully difficult to hide, or cover up. This month, the cover of ESPN The Magazine is filled with a red sweater vest with the word “BUSTED” stitched on the left breast. Inside, writer Ryan McGhee had a piece on how modern social media and world-wide-web scrutiny tends to blow open cases of violations when mated with old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting. The story begins with Bruce Pearl (uttering, “The noise never stops. . . . Even when you sleep, people are out there, digging.”) The story ultimately transits to the Ohio State situation. The title is, “Year of the Scandal.”

As a sidebar, ESPNTM presented a list of more than a dozen news outlets that plied Ohio State with Freedom of Information requests in the days after Yahoo! Sports first broke the news that Tressel was in trouble in March. If there was anything else out there it was going to come to light. And it did. Stories bubbled up locally -- the car stories in The Dispatch were true attention grabbers -- and nationally.

Since last week, it has been in the rumor mill that Sports Illustrated was about to drop an investigave bomb on Ohio State. The SI story was due to hit the web Tuesday afternoon before it hits the newsstands. Today, there were indications that SI might move up its timetable and post on-line sometime this evening. (Stay tuned.) SI is rumored to have stuff on Tressel going back more than a decade. As of this writing, the bomb has yet to drop. But in the meantime, college writer Andy Staples has sounded in.

Wait. The SI investigative piece was just posted. Here it is. I haven't even read it yet, but I will, and I'll file a fresh post with my thoughts once I've digested.

Yahoo! columnist Dan Wetzel co-authored investigative pieces that broke open the floodgates at USC (Reggie Bush) and UConn (Jim Calhoun) and got things rolling in Columbus. I spoke to Wetzel over the weekend and he said he had just done a radio show in Detroit in which he compared l’affaire Tressel with that of the scandal that enveloped the Fab Five at Michigan.

Once Tractor Traylor rolled a $40,000 SUV and broke his arm, the blood was in the water, the national media was mustered and the FOI requests were flying. Booster Ed Martin was outed posthaste and NCAA investigators stormed Ann Arbor. Something similar happened here.

Wetzel said he was watching the Gene Smith press conference on December 23 – the one where Smith said OSU had conducted a “thorough” 11-day investigation and concluded that six players needed to be suspended next season, case closed – and bells went off.

“As soon as that press conference was over I picked up my phone and called (investigative reporter) Charles Robinson,” Wetzel said. “I said we had to look into this. Why? Because there is no such thing as a thorough, 11-day investigation.”

No one expects an athletic department to control all of its players all of the time. If a guy wants to break a NCAA rule he is going to break a NCAA rule. Players are understandably going to seek extra money or a flashy ride or a fancy downtown condo. It is human nature and the current NCAA system attempts to fly in the face of that – constantly jamming the square peg of amateurism into the round hole of capitalism. All while the administrators make millions, of course.

The NCAA is actually lenient on programs that discover and self-report violations. If Tressel had done that back in April of 2010, this wouldn’t be much of a scandal.

The real issue for a school isn’t that a violation occurs. It’s how it responds once it does. Throughout this case Ohio State has acted with bizarre defiance.

And that is a tough way to go in this day and age. Once there is a trace of blood in the water, there is no hiding. It’s not 1977 anymore. There is no hiding your soul.